5/26/2003 @ 12:00AM

Recon Man

A lot of money and hope are going into rebuilding Iraq. Lewis Lucke is the man in the hot seat.

When General
Jay Garner
, the first “viceroy” of Iraq, stepped into Baghdad’s Republican Palace, he found no running water, no electricity and lots of rubble. Who ya gonna call? A humble Austin, Texas, globetrotter named
Lewis Lucke
. Garner may have gotten all the press as he pressed flesh with U.S. troops, but it’s Lucke’s job to turn on the lights. His bed at the palace was a cot he had brought with him from Kuwait. “We were camping, in essence,” says the 52-year-old.

And now he’s supervising
Bechtel Group
as it starts to dredge Umm Qasr, Iraq’s only seaport, to ready it for matériel to rebuild the country. Lucke is the coordinator for reconstruction, managing a $2.5 billion project that some expect will inevitably balloon to $30 billion, if not $100 billion. As the ranking man on the ground for the U.S.
Agency for International Development
(AID), his hands are also closest to the purse strings, since his State Department branch is funding and contracting out much of the work.

He’s starting small with 35 government workers and five U.S. contractors, including Bechtel and Seattle’s Stevedoring Services of America. At the top of his to-do list: resuscitating a power station in the capital, a bridge in Mosul and water supplies in Basra. Later he will supervise the reconstruction of airports, schools, railroads and highways. Lucke is also overseeing drug and medical-equipment imports and Unicef’s efforts to provide a somewhat normal school year for Iraqi kids. “It has been humbling,” says Lucke. “However much time you spend planning something like this, being able to put it together on the ground is complex and depends on things that are not in your control.”

A career foreign-service officer, Lucke spent 24 years managing AID projects in trouble spots like Mali and Haiti, picking up some Arabic while running the government’s $200 million economic development program in Jordan. He retired right before Sept. 11, but re-upped last November when AID began gearing up for Iraq. Lucke joined Garner’s group after its creation in January, surviving the Pentagon’s brutal scrutiny (it rejected eight other diplomats the State Department wanted). His biggest concern now: security, which seems to be getting dicier by the day.